Could it be love?
He seems more like a child prodigy. Those enraptured with his gifts urge him on, like anxious parents, trying to pull that sustained, dazzling performance out of him that they believe he’s capable of; they are willing to put up with the prodigy’s occasional listlessness and crabbiness, his flights of self-regard and self-righteousness. Despite his uneven efforts and distaste for the claws of competition, they can see he is a golden child, one who moves, speaks, smiles and thinks with amazing grace.
His advisers and fund-raisers have pressed him to go fortissimo. Many voters with great expectations are hovering, hoping for a crescendo.
Except for panicked Clintonistas, everyone seems eager to see if the young pol can live up to his potential. Responding to his more combative style, the press has relaunched him, giving him a second chance to shine, on this week’s cover of Time, in the pages of The New Yorker, in the up arrow of Newsweek, which now declares him “poised to be the comeback kid,” and at The Times, where young female assistants lined the halls on Wednesday to watch him glide into a second meeting with editorial board writers and editors.
In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan lays out what he sees as Obama’s “indispensable” capacity to move the country past baby-boom feuds and the world past sectarian and racial divides. “It’s November 2008,” he imagines. “A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.”…
Obama got an introduction from Chris Rock, who warned the audience that “you’d be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn’t down with it. You’d say, ‘Aw, man, I can’t call him now. I had that white lady. What was I thinking?’”
Two points: (a) the power of people’s wanting to believe is pretty amazing to behold sometimes; and (b) Senator Clinton has a big problem when it comes to empathy.
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
…the power of people’s wanting to believe is pretty amazing to behold sometimes…
Ben Franklin is often quoted to the effect that people who would give up liberty for temporary security deserve neither.
It’s an obvious point once you realize it, so the trick is to keep people, perhaps including yourself, from realizing it. The populist demagogue proceeds by promising security in the language of change, challenge and renewal.
IMO a majority of today’s voting public is not fooled, but the Democrats will likely win anyway. The admirable Virginia Postrel quotes one Daniel Weintraub:
My gut reaction is that ‘compassionate conservatism’ is more dishonest, and ultimately more pernicious, than Clinton’s and Obama’s shticks.
December 3rd, 2007 at 4:09 am
“My gut reaction is that ‘compassionate conservatism’ is more dishonest, and ultimately more pernicious, than Clinton’s and Obama’s shticks.”
Absolutely. I read the philosophy when Bush began to define himself as a “compassionate conservative” and was appalled. The ideologues first concede every premise of socialism, then say that they’d be better at redistributing the wealth of others than the honest Marxists have been. Pffft. All they’ve managed to do is wreck the party. Better an honest, up-front Marxist than a pretend conservative.